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Wall Street on Parade

A Citizen Guide to Wall Street

Digital Front Page of the New York Times, Early Tuesday Morning, June 8, 2021

If you’re an early riser and like a cup of coffee with online news before officially starting your day, you got your coffee sans the news at numerous websites this morning. From approximately 5:30 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. ET this morning, major news sites like the New York Times, CNN, Financial Times, and Guardian U.K. were dark or had error messages.

The sites were not just dark in the U.S. but around the world. According to Fastly, which took the blame for the outages, the disruption impacted major cities across the U.S. and around the world, including Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Chicago, London, Paris, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Stockholm, Munich, Amsterdam, Santiago, Rio de Janeiro and dozens more.

According to the Guardian news outlet in the U.K., Fastly is “a cloud computing services provider” that is supposed to “speed up loading times for websites, protect them from denial-of-service attacks, and help them deal with bursts of traffic.” Unfortunately, continues the Guardian “…that technology requires Fastly to sit between most of its clients and their users. That means that if the service suffers a catastrophic failure, it can prevent those companies from operating on the net at all.”

It was not just news outlets that went dark. The U.K. government’s websites were impacted as were Reddit and Amazon and dozens of other sites.

According to Downdetector, the outages began at CNN at 5:28 a.m. and peaked at 6:23 a.m. ET. Outages at the New York Times, according to reports at Downdetector, began at around 5:22 am. and peaked at around 6:17 a.m. with 2,068 people reporting an outage. By 7:32 a.m. only 49 people were reporting problems at the New York Times.

Reddit users thronged to Downdetector to report outages and post comments. One commenter, Erika Horvat, wrote that “Everything is down. App, browsers, everything.” The outage at Reddit, which hosts the popular WallStreetBets message board, where users pump meme stocks like GameStop and AMC, began around 5:28 a.m. and had 20,283 people reporting outages at the peak at 5:58 a.m. ET. By 7:58 a.m., few people were reporting any problems.

These are the Downdetector outage reports for three of the websites impacted: